MIKEMETRICS.COM

M

M

••• METRICS

NOTES ON QUANTITATIVE ARCHAEOLOGY AND R

...

This is a radically revised and expanded version of notes first made available about three years ago (Septembet 2012), now as a book with all the paraphernalia that entails (index etc). As noted at the time, it was started during a period of enforced convalescence and shelved, with what had been written at the time made available, when I returned to my day job. I subsequently retired, but developed new research interests and neglected quantitative archaeology for a bit. With a revival of interest in mid-2014 I picked up the threads and the fruits of this are presented below.

The original intention was simply to tidy up the text and add a largely written chapter on cluster analysis. But 'The best laid schemes of mice and men' etc. - I got carried away. The original text included Chapters 1-6, Appendix A and parts of Chapters 7 and 9 of the present text, but these have, for the most part, been drastically revised; nearly everthing else is new. The full text is available here and can also be found, with other things, on my academia.edu site. The data files from Appendix B, and those in the text, are available in the Excel file listed below.

As usual with this kind of thing, as soon as it's made available you realise what's wrong with it and how it could be improved. As noted in the Preface, I have no real aptitude for programming, and those who do will undoubtedly improve on my efforts if it seems worth pursuing; I'd make a serious effort myself if the book was to be rewritten (which is not part of my plans). Retrospectively, when I resumed writing it was probably with the 'mindset' I had when I shelved the initial draft and, alas, things move very rapidly. Having 'taken my eye off the ball' while having a vacation from archaeology things have developed in ways I was largely unaware of that I'm now catching up on.

Archaeological applications of R are rather more widespread than I give credit for in the book; on present reading a lot of seems quite recent and largely undertaken by archaeological scientists and/or mathematically able archaeologists of the kind who publish regularly in the Journal of Archaeological Science and suchlike. The subject of spatial analysis is largely omitted from the book; rather to my surprise - a welcome one, and I would not have predicted it - there seems to have been a recent resurgence of interest in what I recognise as the statistical modelling of spatial, spatio-temporal and temporal data that goes well-beyond what is available in menu-driven GIS software. Much of this seems to be led by researchers who have, or have had, connections to the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. It encourages the hope that Hodder and Orton's classic 1976 text, Spatial Analysis in Archaeology, will soon find a long-overdue and worthy successor. Given my time again, or pehaps just another year, I'd have been tempted to write a chapter on the subject for the book.

Readers are free to use these notes in any way they see fit; acknowledgement of any such use for publication purposes would be welcome but isn’t mandatory. The usual disclaimer, that if anything goes wrong I cannot be held liable, applies; if there are problems with the text or code (the notes are intended to be useful and usable) please let me know.